Technology news

Every time some very kind person mistakenly compliments the cute, anxious-looking Mimikyu tattooed on my forearm for Pikachu, I become giddy because I get to talk about Pokémon’s best.Now, after trailing in Pikachu’s shadow for too long, The Pokémon Company is talking about him, too. The company’s social media team is dedicating the entire month of October to celebrate Mimikyu, who first made its debut in Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon in November 2016

Image: UPS UPS announced that it has received government approval to operate a “drone airline.” Don’t expect your next package to arrive directly on your doorstep by a drone, though: UPS says it will first use this certification to build a drone delivery network for hospital campuses around the US. UPS said in July that it was seeking permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate the network, and today, it got just that.Specifically, UPS’s drone delivery

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The internet is real life, but the place where the internet meets real life is still messy as hell. TwitchCon, which was held at San Diego’s convention center this year — the same place where the biggest comic con in America happens every year — is the site of one of those collisions, where IRL meets URL. I just got back from the convention floor, which was a riot of people of different ages, abilities, and ethnicities. (The brands were

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge For more than six years, designer Zach Gage has been toying with an idea for a game where players explore dangerous dungeons, but did so through various cards stacked in a grid, rifling through piles to heal or fight a monster. It’s an idea he played with endlessly, until around two years ago when he turned it into a functioning prototype that he’d show only trusted friends.
But Gage wanted to do something bigger than he was used to. He ma

Photo: Sony Pictures Entertainment In August, Sony and Marvel announced that Spider-Man would no longer be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, due to disagreements about the revenue split between Disney and Sony, and the involvement of MCU architect Kevin Feige. It appeared as if Sony would be taking its own tack on secret superhero Peter Parker, without needing to integrate him into the continuity of films that began with 2008’s Iron Man.
The split came at a particularly relevant time

Can you never find a scooter to rent when you need one? Here’s a radical idea. Buy one. While Bird, Lime, Skip, Scoot, Uber, Lyft and more compete for on-demand micromobility, a new startup invented a vehicle worthy of ownership. The Unagi looks downright futuristic with its classy paint jobs, foldable body, LED screen and built-in lights. The ride feels sturdy, strong and responsive while being light enough at 24 lbs to lug up subway stairs or the flights to your home.
That’s why Un

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has announced that it’s launching direct message search for all users on iOS starting today, October 1st. The feature, which has long been a top request for avid users, first entered into testing last month when Twitter said it would only work with your “most recent DMs.” It also doesn’t let you search the content of messages; you have to type in the names of people or groups.Still, it’s better than nothing. At the ti

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1. WeWork withdraws its S-1 filing, will delay its IPO
The move was widely expected, but The We Company(which owns WeWork) made it official yesterday, with new co-CEOs Artie Minson and Sebastian Gunningham declaring that they’ve “decided to postpone our IPO to focus on our core busine

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple’s Deep Fusion photography system has arrived in the latest developer betas of iOS 13, hopefully hinting that it will ship for the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro soon.To refresh your memory, Deep Fusion is a new image processing pipeline for medium-light images, which Apple senior VP Phil Schiller called “computational photography mad science” when he introduced it onstage. But like much of iOS 13, Deep Fusion wasn’t ready when the

Skydio today announced the the “Skydio 2” smart drone. It’s a feature-packed ‘flying film crew’ capable of navigating through forests, over water, and at speeds of up to 38MPH. I reviewed the company’s first drone, the R1, and my jaw’s still on the floor. There’s nothing else out there like a Skydio drone. Most drones fall into the “remote control vehicle” category, the R1 and Skydio 2 are better described as robots. They rely on compu

Photo: Nicole Wilder / Amazon Studios About halfway through Transparent’s movie-length series finale, which hit Amazon on September 27th, the feisty Shelly Pfefferman (played by Judith Light) sings a song to her judgmental middle-aged children called “Your Boundary Is My Trigger,” where she uses the kids’ own language against them. She says that every time they block her from commenting on or meddling in their lives, she considers it a personal assault because it’s

Image: Yahoo A former Yahoo software engineer has pleaded guilty to improperly accessing the accounts of around 6,000 Yahoo users in search of nude photos and videos. The news, outlined in a press release from the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, says programmer Reyes Daniel Ruiz used his privileges at Yahoo to crack user passwords and access the accounts of primarily younger women, including friends and co-workers.It is unclear if Ruiz’s ability to acce

It’s Harley Quinn’s time to shine in the first trailer for Birds of Prey, a companion movie to Warner Bros.’ 2016 DC Comics film Suicide Squad.
The trailer finds Harley Quinn dealing with her breakup with Joker, her longtime lover and confidant. She wanted a fresh start, as she says in the trailer, and she quickly learns she isn’t “the only dame looking for emancipation.” Along with her newfound friends, Harley will take on Gotham City in a way she hasn’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An appeals court has upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality laws, but it vacated a rule that would prevent states from passing their own. The decision mostly marks a defeat for Mozilla, which sued the agency last year. But it’s tentatively positive for states like California, which has been fighting for the right to impose stricter net neutrality laws.
The District of Columbia Court of Appeals says the FCC had

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Pandora has revamped its smartphone app to focus on personalization, leveraging the data from its Music Genome Project to serve up custom-curated music and podcast recommendations.
There’s now a dedicated “For You” tab, which features a feed that dynamically updates throughout the day with new and different content broken down into “modules.” These modules are categories like Moods, Decades, or Artists on the Rise. Pandor

Photo by Saeed Adyani / Netflix This week on our Vergecast interview series, The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel chats with filmmaker Davis Guggenheim on his new documentary Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, which premiered on Netflix earlier this month.Davis talks about the two years he spent filming with the Microsoft co-founder, as well as how he got Gates to participate in the film, the structure of the documentary, the most surprising things he learned about the man

Image: TiVo First leaked earlier this year, the TiVo Edge DVR is now official. As expected, it includes support for both the Dolby Vision and Atmos standards, which will benefit any services that support them, such as Netflix.
There are two TiVo Edge models to choose from. The TiVo Edge for cable gets you a 2TB hard drive and six TV tuners, while the TiVo Edge for antenna has the same size hard drive, but drops the number of tuners down to four. The cable model costs $399.99, and requires an ad

Books on tape were the lifeblood of self-help. But e-learning startups like Khan Academy and Coursera demanded our eyes, not just our ears. Then came podcasts that make knowledge accessible, yet rarely focus on you retaining and applying what they teach.
Today, a new startup called Knowable is launching to provide gaze-free audio education at $100 per eight-hour course on topics like how to launch a startup or how to sleep better. The idea is that by layering chapter summaries and eventually int

Europe’s highest court, the CJEU, has ruled that pre-checked cookie consent boxes do not provide the necessary legal consent needed for websites — TechCrunch reports. Basically, when you open a new website, you need to manually opt in for non-essential cookies. If you don’t, the website doesn’t have any legal right to process your non-essential data. So if you see a pop-up saying you’ve received a cookie, with a pointless ‘ok’ button, then that website

Long ago, anyone who wanted to invest in the stock market had to use a broker, or pay steep charges every time they made a trade. Then, a few years ago, Robinhood burst on the scene. This revolutionary fintech app, which launched in 2013, allows people to buy stocks and shares commission-free. It was a concept that quickly took off with the general public, who were virtually excluded from the financial markets. After less than a year, Robinhood had almost 500,000 users. By 2017, it had executed

The world is in a state of climate emergency. The importance of tackling climate change has arguably never been higher. Governments around the world are coming under increasing pressure to act and deliver initiatives to make our cities greener, cleaner, and all-round better places to live.  It’s no easy task, but with modern technology, like artificial intelligence and big data analysis tech startups are able to give a helping hand and contribute to making our cities greener. In Euro

Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has responded to criticism from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over her plans to break up major tech companies. This morning, The Verge published leaked audio of an internal Q&A session with Zuckerberg, including a question on Warren’s plan. “If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,” he re

Microsoft has started a special promo for new subscribers to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, its all-in-one service that combines Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass for both console and PC. If you sign up, you’ll get six months of Spotify Premium ad-free music streaming as a complementary bonus along with the subscription.
Microsoft has been pretty tight with Spotify in recent years, replacing its own defunct Groove Music app with Spotify as the default music player on Windows 10. For Xbox One players,

For the past five years, we’ve heard countless reports on how hard content moderation really is, and moderators at social networking giant Facebook could have it the toughest. Earlier this year, The Verge’s Casey Newton published an article titled “The Trauma Floor” which revealed the secret lives of Facebook moderators in America, and more specifically, the harrowing conditions these employees were tasked with on a daily basis.  In a two-hour leaked audio recording

The director of Bitcoin escrow service Volantis Market is facing several years in prison if found guilty of cryptocurrency-related fraud. According to the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York, Jon Barry Thompson took more than $7 million from two victim companies after making false claims in connection with Bitcoin transactions. “As alleged, Jon Barry Thompson repeatedly lied to investors in cryptocurrencies about the safety of their investments made through his

The firm behind blockchain-powered cloud computing service EOS must pay $24 million for violating US securities law with its initial coin offering (ICO). “Block.one did not register its ICO as a securities offering pursuant to the federal securities laws, nor did it qualify for or seek an exemption from the registration requirements,” said the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) via a press release. The SEC highlighted the publishing of its investigation into autonomous bloc

Facebook’s plans to open up its data vault for researchers to analyze the platform’s influence on elections has run into privacy concerns. In April 2018, the social media giant announced a new initiative to share a database of URLs its users have linked to between January 1, 2017 to February 19, 2019. To that effect, the company had partnered with an independent research commission, known as Social Science One (SSO), to evaluate the dataset and ensure the shared treasure trove

Since it was announced earlier this year, Facebook‘s “cryptocurrency” Libra has been dragged over the coals many times. And now it seems staff at the Big F are also apprehensive about its launch. Internal interviews between Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook employees were leaked today, by The Verge, and appear to show unease amongst the ranks. Zuck called for staff to rally together against skeptics, critics, and the regulators. But what about Libra? Indeed, staff made Facebook&lsq

South Korea is one of the world’s technological powerhouses, home to giants such as Samsung, LG, and Kia. The small Asian country truly punches above its weight as it’s starting to rival the digital prowess of its much bigger neighbors, China and Japan. But what might come as a surprise, is that Korean innovation isn’t solely fueled by the big corporates. Seoul’s startup scene is on the rise, with several unicorns emerging like Woowa Brothers and online retailer Coupang.